When Newsjacking Goes Wrong
Over on Facebook, there is a company selling scarves. Today they posted a rather unfortunate attempt at newsjacking.
newsjacking: when you seek to connect your business/product to current news/events, in an attempt to gain attention for yourself or your business.
There really isn’t anything new about newsjacking. David Meerman Scott has a book out about Newsjacking. It has been going on for a long, long time. Today with personal publishing and social media – anyone can attempt to tie their product / service to current news and events. The question is, when will it work and when will it look tacky. Should you try it?
There are ways to do it right. There are ways to do it wrong. This one is wrong.
Toomers Rolls blatantly links to a news story. They then give a link to their site which seeks to sell their product.
Toomers Rolls writes, “…we too can preserve their legacy, wrapped in spirit, with Toomers Rolls!” OK, we wrap ourselves in your product and we feel better? We help save the trees?”
No where on their site do I see any mention of – oh, I don’t know – giving proceeds to support the preservation of the trees. Nope. And, even if they had … this is just tacky.
For people not familiar with the poisoning of the Toomer’s Oaks, just know it is a deeply saddening event for our community. ESPN even made a documentary about the Auburn/Alabama rivalry and it focused heavily on the poisoning of the trees, for crying out loud. The Toomer’s Oaks are the centerpiece of one of America’s most enduring and endearing college football traditions.
You don’t do a product tie-in related to tragedy. It just isn’t good practice.
The site is Toomers Rolls. I have been a supporter. You know, alumni trying to start up a product. You want to support them. We even did stories about them, in 2011 when they launched, in class writing assignments – published online to give them attention. This sours the experience. I hope they learn from their mistakes. I contacted them privately. They attempted to deflect and ignore the error.
Sad, really. They had promise.
Actually, newsjacking as I describe it has not been going on for a long time.
While you may have been doing things similar to Newsjacking for years, what changed recently is that Google now indexes in real-time. That allow a timely blog post to be seen by journalists as they search for more information on a topic. Real-time is the key here. Yet nearly all PR people are in campaign mode rather than real-time mode, so those like us who understand newsjacking have an advantage.
David
It is carried out differently in the variation you describe, David. However, aside from perhaps a quicker indexing of items on Google, I’m not sure it is essentially different.
Here is an example from the launch of the very first iPhone in 2001. Spanning Sync v1.0 to Support iPhone. They were hoping for pickup by search engines over a decade ago.
One could argue that newsjacking (also referred to as coattail PR) dates back to 1929 (and earlier). Bernays’ stunt called “torches of liberty” involved getting women to march in the NYC Easter Parade smoking cigarettes. It was taboo for women to smoke in public, until that day. The stunt coattailed the news event that Bernays knew would be covered by that day’s media. It even spread through word-of-mouth from spectators sharing the gossipy meme. Yes, different era, with no internet, yet it achieved the same purpose. People always sought out gossip … just in different ways.
The difference today is really the enabling technology involved and how people find news, not the strategy. The tactics are merely carried out differently, too. Same process.
My point, of course, was not to debate newsjacking in its current form. I do agree with you that it is an evolving practice. The GolinHarris example of The Bridge is a great example. They are still riding coattails in their newsjacking efforts.
I really sought to differentiate between good and bad practice in newsjacking / coattail PR.
David, you do agree that there are right ways and wrong ways to select the stories you use (forgive me this term) as a hook, don’t you?